Original Diablo Pitch Document (1994) [pdf]
graybeardgames.com
graybeardgames.com
Especially the music. Matt Ulemen has created a masterpiece soundtrack!
PS. It is very funny that reading this pitch document I haven't noticed any of that ephemeral things that build this unique atmosphere. Funny how such pitches are evaluated only on the sole raw description the gameplay and nothing else...
I loved the old games with shoddy graphics, spent hundreds of hours playing them in high school - but going back to them I just can't get in to it - not even the supposedly great games I haven't played like Baldur's Gate/Planescape Torment even when I played and liked Icewind Dale (same gameplay/graphics different story) and neverwinter nights (first 3D version - very bad 3D graphics). I tried picking up old NVN because I can remember the immersive feeling when I first played trough that game and all the expansions - but when I picked it up I just got bored by lack of narrated dialog, no dialog animation, etc. Hard to play a game like that after playing something like Mass Effect and Witcher 3.
The same thing about movies, especially when they rely on CGI - CGI does not age well at all - stuff that was considered great even 10 years ago is a joke when watching now.
I don't think there is a universal bar when it comes to evaluating stuff like this - even the enjoyment of it is based on expectations that's set by other similar content and others improving graphics just raises the standards.
I understand for CGI, I saw LotR last week, and Gollum feels like a bunch of polygon composited on top of film. The issue is that having a 'digital' creature took too much importance. The rest was subpar. Filming, lightnin, music, so of course now that the pixel magic is not working anymore we're left with a hangover.
What I like with old games is the symbolism of representations. An opencl tesselated is not more of a treasure casket than a few pixels, probably even less. These games read more like a book were your mind fulfill the rest. I also saw the pico8 project. Games on this faux 8bit console have the old clothing but with slightly more refined mechanics and physics (say having a few more planes, some particles), they're wonderful.
The question is why a VGA pixel soup that was Half Life (on my underpowered 3dfx-less box) felt so appealing. It wasn't even prettier than other games of this era.
Sound and music design was pretty fresh. Can't ignore that.
It had a restrained realistic palette instead of the colored lighting everywhere of, say, Quake 2.
Goes well with my movie arguments. I can rewatch SW 4 without issues mostly because of John Williams music. The 70s film color spectrum is also at play. So far, things have to be refined in many dimension instead of being all-in on some technical specs. Kinda reminds me of Nintendo way of life. Their hardware was often subpar (slower cpu) yet a better substrate to make games interesting, beautiful visually and musically.
At the time Nintendo made card games and such, and he basically brought the C64 over, and demoed various stuff.
Give it a few years and the guy is running the company that may well have rebooted the gaming console market.
Thing about those early consoles was that there was basically no firmware or OS. Every game had full run of the hardware, much like any software had on the early microcomputers.
Characters talking to you in-game, banal everyday moments and a believable world (ex elements caused by "the accident"), seeing your hands, a reactive environment (remember, for you youngsters, boxes shattering and random items on desks being movable was novel!).
All the little details added up to just make the world feel different than other games I'd played.
But Quake 3 became barely a footnote in gaming, while HL made Valve quite famous.
Nobody plays games to count polygons or marvel at shader efficiency.
Similarly, when i play most MMORPGs i rarely stop to consider the story given by each quest. But i recently picked up Elder Scrolls Online, and there every minor NPC is voiced (most of the lines are read by the same small pool of voice actors). It makes the quests that much more interesting even though most of them are the same old fetch/kill kind.
One quest i got particularly fond of began with me picking up a disembodied skull that ask me to assemble his skeleton. And it make various comments throughout the quest.
I think you are misunderstanding me with HL comment - I'm not saying you need to have the best graphics in the generation to be a good game - I'm saying every generation raises the bar for "tolerable" on multiple value scales (both graphics, gameplay, story, sound/voice acting).
HL had good graphics for it's era, and as someone else mentioned you can pull a lot of weight if you have a style that works with what you have. For example Fallout games have/had crap graphics compared to contemporary shooters - for example Bioshock was much better graphically and stylistically - but it's good enough to be passable so you can focus on gameplay/story/world.
But if Fallout 3/4 had HL1 graphics and design constraints I doubt I or many other people would play it.
Edit: that is something I noticed: those 4k+ bigscreen TVs make material not specially made for it (which is most for now) look far worse than on my crap TV. It is far too detailed so I have a continues uncanny valley feeling even with the latest productions.
The run for tech and visual is natural. I'm sure all generations had this. When it's gone you're left with timeless principles. What I'd call the 'classics'. Good thins have a good deal of it. And this classical features are related to the tech used to implement. More to how our minds find joy.
When I watch old movies I see them without the glow of the era they were born in. I see the framework behind, and how theatrical they were. How they faked most of things, with moving pictures instead of actors on a scene. But the rules are still there. Surprise, tension, suspense, exageration, timing, aesthetic, oddity, rhythm.
I find it a crying shame a lot of people cannot appreciate these shows, movies or games. They are not that different...
Edit: I do not think I watched or read Clash of the Titan '81 so I will.
I guess there's a time for visual bliss but like many things it wears off if abused. Today is more about large scale SFX and not enough of the rest. Reading is low on visual and has to be high on the rest. I did read few pages of scripts and found it very interesting too, but maybe for historical purposes (seeing drafts of Terminator, Alien, etc)
If you like greek mythology and shiny metals you'll probably enjoy CotT. It's not Kubrick's mastery worth, but it has a glow of simple magical, fantasy, that I rarely, if ever, found again.
I have noticed that people don't care for CGI that much anymore. We see so much of it that we have become inured to it while it used to be a movie "feature". So inured that most of the CGI is actually pretty mediocre but people don't seem to care. It has made me appreciate the old (and more "mechanical") special effects much more.
The other part is 'live set'. Nowadays cameras are removed from the action, and are often on a plane, not moving through, near, close to actors. The first minute of Alien is telling, it walks through the ship, the steam, the wires. I felt more immersed than in Avatar with 3D glasses. Actors were framed closer, and felt a bit more connected too.
In the Diablo postmortem last week at GDC, David Brevik (Blizzard North co-founder) said[1] that Matt Ulemen bugged them until they gave him the job.
That worked out pretty well to say the least!
[1] https://twitter.com/SorenJohnson/status/710965128502452225
Its an online only ARPG where everyone can play a number of heroes (and some villains) from the Marvel universe (the in game justification is that a very powerful artifact is screwing up reality, allowing multiple variants of the characters to exist at the same time).
He and his wife stream on twitch and play every week as they've done for years now. Every now and again he'll talk about game dev type stuff, few weeks (maybe months now I forget) he talked about the tile generation in Diablo. He also still plays Everquest 1 of all things.
Thus there is a big risk that they will concoct schemes that will drive a gamer up the wall.
Maybe what I think is fun is more addiction than fun? Hard to tell. Obtaining random loot sure is addictive.
> The trembling hazelnut eardrops of the great tree, born in a hurricane, intoxicate me as they roll on the furrowed board. The dice seem to me like a drink of Soma from Mount Mujavant, keeping me awake and excited.
> [...]
> The dice goad like hooks and sting like whips; they enslave, deceive, and torment. They give presents as children do, striking back at the winners. They are coated with honey - an irresistible power over the gambler.
Gameplay-wise it was actually pretty broken. Gold takes up space in your inventory, and there was no concept of a stash, so you'd just dump your gold on the ground in town. The best strategy was to fight through the dungeon until your inventory fills up, then go back to town, sell off everything, buy the best stuff you can see, rinse and repeat.
Online multiplayer wasn't much better, mostly because of the "duping" bug which allowed players to easily duplicate items.
That said, it's still a fun game to play through, because of the atmosphere of it. Multiplayer is also great with friends so long as you don't break the game. And you can set challenges for yourself to make it more fun (e.g. "Ironman" mode, where you can't buy items or go back to town without dying).
Diablo 2 and 3 are great games in their own way, but as you say, they rely on that addictive random loot-fest, which I never really liked.
From the ouside you see a darkened room with some blobs that may be raw flesh inside. Open the door and you hear "ah, fresh meat" as a voiceover.
Right after that a big, bulky demon with a bloodstained apron and a meat cleaver walks into view.
Gamasutra has a good writeup of that session: http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/268507/20_years_later_Dav...
Lots of interesting tidbits about the game's development and the company.
Oh, and there was a nice moment during the Q&A - a fan who pirated Diablo back in the day walked up to the stage and gave them some money.
the companies take a fee out of the "store" for every payment. This in turn means the payment has to be large enough to cover the fee and still allow profit.
The sum of said payment is likely to end up being above most people's "no worries" threshold. Never mind that now the card info is in yet another potentially hackable database.
It reminds me of the study in Freakonomics about day care centers and the problem of parents sometimes not picking up their kids on time. Which meant that employees would have to stay after closing. So they started charging parents a small fee for being late. The result was that parents were more late than ever, since it meant they no longer felt guilty. The fine removed the guilt associated with being late.
You like an artist, you're honest and not poor. You can buy a cd for x, where some tiny percentage of x goes to the artists. Or you could download the cd and pay x to the artist.
In Paris, 2008, there was the "Worldwide Invitational", a Blizzard convention much like BlizzCon but much smaller scale (About ~7k people in total went).
Many rumors were going around about the announcement of a new game. Even more rumors about "Diablo III", which had been said to be in the works for almost a decade. After the opening ceremony, Mike Morhaime gave his usual speech and started dropping hints, gave a long lead up to "Blizzard's newest game".
And without saying any name, a musician came on stage and started doing the Tristram riff. Everybody immediately understands what's going on. The lights go red. Everybody yelling and clapping - unbelievable excitement.
Cinematic starts. Chills. Still no name for that "new game". The cinematic starts cutting faster and faster, hinting more and more at Diablo until we see Diablo himself in a cut. And then... three fiery claws across the screen lead into the name: "Diablo III".
There's no way I can do that story justice, but this was one of the most incredible announcement Blizzard has done - and since WWI doesn't get as much coverage as BlizzCon, not many people got to hear about it. Here's two videos:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PQk_CT7fY9E (from the audience)
Sadly I didn't find that D3 lived up to D2 and D1 atmosphere-wise. The ending of the first chapter put me off the game entirely -- I guess they were trying to shift the focus of the story to other characters for a new audience.
I can't put my finger on it, but somehow D3 felt less connected to D1 and D2 than D2 did to D1.
Maybe I only played DII+, but that doesn't sound like much like diablo that I remember. esp turn based?
But those illustrations look like they came straight from The Goetia!
Even though I sometimes wished for a deeper dungeon or perma-death like when I played Angband and ZAngband; but I do remember enjoying the atmosphere and story of Diablo and Diablo II and having a lot of fun playing multiplayer with friends. Even with more advanced games out, I remember getting together with some high school friends when home on a college break to setup a LAN and play Diablo II---five years old and still lots of fun!
Some of the changes are described in this chapter of the book "Stay Awhile and Listen": http://www.shacknews.com/article/76406/chapter-8-finale-cond.... The part I found especially interesting was how they changed it from turn-based to ARPG:
> Our company was saying, "We're going to take on this developer, Condor, and we're going to publish their game. It's called Diablo." And for a couple of months we were working on it not knowing that it was turn-based. When it came out that it was turn-based, we said, "No, that sucks."
> We actually took a vote. They said, "Raise your hand if you would buy this game if it were turn-based." I think two people raised their hands. Then they said, "Raise your hand if you would buy this game if it were real-time." Everybody raised their hands. Allen went in and called Dave Brevik and said, "Look, you've got to make this real-time."
The pitch doc also talks about ever popular roguelike trope of perma-death, it's a heavy pill to swallow for a commercial game in 1994.
Wiki says Condor was bought by Blizzard nine months before Diablo launched. Then, after Diablo II the team split into two separate companies?
Also, I'm guessing this pitch document was to investors for initial funding. I'm curious to know how much they raised and who from. This doc looks like it came from experienced game devs.
They were shut down after they failed to produce any progress on Diablo III for years (like I said in another post, Diablo III had been expected for almost a decade before its announcement).
Wiki: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blizzard_North
Longer documentary that goes into the history of Blizzard, and talks a bit about Blizzard North: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AHz2ky-jng8
Am I correct in thinking that a team this size would be considered closer to an indy game in 2016? I am not a game developer but this seems like a very stark comparison to the current landscape / size of software teams (not just limited to games).
So for all we know it could have been pitched in Q4 1994 and finished in Q1 1996.
Also, a low-end machine could run it!
Diablo II, still the same thing - it was basically a better Diablo I.
Diablo III on the other hand came out with an Auction House - which basically killed it. I played in the early parts of DIII, it was okay but not as fun as DI and DII. However, things are very different now. There have been lots of updates in Diablo III and Blizzard killed the Auction House - So can't say how it feels now. But I'm pretty sure the "randomness" is still there - which basically what drives the game.
Does anybody know how big the seed is for Diablo's RNG? I'm guessing it would have to be 1 value for the environment (to ensure saving/reloading into the same world) but would that 1 value determine all pseudo-randomness (AI aside) in the game (e.g. item drops and their stats).
So I guess there are 2^31-1 unique dungeons per level. Storing, rather than dynamically generating, these dungeons would require a huge amount of disk space. For each level, a 112x112 two-dimensional array of 32-bit integers is used to store the piece IDs which make up each tile (a tile consists of four pieces) [5], and a 40x40 two-dimensional array of 8-bit integers is used to store the tile IDs [6]. Thus, a total of 51776 bytes (roughly 50 KB) is required to store the contents of each generated dungeon.
In total, more than 100 TB would be required to store the contents of each unique procedurally generated dungeon per level. The game contains 17 levels, so to store each unique dungeon for each level, a storage capacity of about 1.7 PB would be required. This might be possible today, but was definitely a challenge back in 1996.
[1]: https://github.com/sanctuary/notes/blob/master/bss/engine.md... [2]: https://github.com/sanctuary/notes/blob/master/functions/eng... [3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_congruential_generator#... [4]: https://github.com/sanctuary/d1/blob/master/rand/rand.go [5]: https://github.com/sanctuary/notes/blob/master/bss/gendung.m... [6]: https://github.com/sanctuary/notes/blob/master/bss/gendung.m...
Reading this now, the use of the male pronoun here felt extremely surprising to me. And indeed Diablo 1 was ultimately released with the female rogue character class. I wonder if that was just a mistake, or whether something significant changed throughout the game's development process.
Note that in Diablo 1 (1996) and Diablo 2 (2000), the gender of each class was fixed (with more male than female options), but in Diablo 3 (2012) gender choices became available for each class.
I think this should be considered a victory for feminism, and a real sign of progress taken over these past ~20 years.
It's standard in English to use the male pronoun in cases where you would refer to both or either gender.
The Wikipedia article for "singular they" [0] notes that, politics aside, it was a common recommendation. However, there was never a consensus that this was correct, and accordingly it was never standard. It has examples from the 1800s of famous authors using singular they. Plus bonus quotations of Chaucer and Shakespeare!
There are also some good counterexamples of this making any amount of sense. My favorite is a reader letter to the New York Times from 1985:
"""The average American needs the small routines of getting ready for work. As he shaves or blow-dries his hair or pulls on his panty-hose, he is easing himself by small stages into the demands of the day."
— C. Badendyck [sic], New York Times (1985)"""
All that being said, it was definitely still taught in the 90s, because I learned that it was correct when I was in grade school, and unlearned it later. I would believe that the authors of this document were using the gender neutral pronoun. I would also easily believe that they were making a game for men, where the protagonists were all men.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singular_they#Trend_to_gender-...
I think you meant to say it 'has' become a common recommendation, historically the singular masculine pronoun for the gender neutral was much more prevalent.
The only thing that bothers me is when the world is inconsistent about how it applies its rules. But all of that is far less important than the gameplay itself.
I find this much easier when choosing male characters. I'll still play as female characters without issue in games where you're supposed to beplaying as a particular character with a backstory and such, like Mirror's Edge or Tomb Raider or something.